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American-born of Indian heritage, Nitish Kulkarni took a Masters degree in music production at the Berklee Campus in Valencia, Spain. And as other students turn their dissertations into books, this feels like a postgraduate composition turned into an album. It features many world instruments, including mbira (thumb piano), oud (lute), Spanish guitar, uilleann pipes and batá drums among others. But they are laced into a New Age ambient soundscape that makes their distinctive sounds bland and at best slightly exotic. There are four tracks where solos on mbira, oud, erhu (fiddle) and theorbo (an elegant, long-necked Renaissance lute) are highlighted, but even these are softened by ambient electronics.

It's one of those albums that seems to have no faith in the music it claims to be highlighting – although, arguably, it isn't highlighting any tradition at all, rather just what you can technically do in a top-class studio. For a particularly depressing example, listen to ‘Wordless’, which combines keyboards, flamenco guitar, duduk and rock drumming for a very long four minutes over a dreary repeated chord sequence. Or, as Nitish Kulkarni would have it, ‘a pan-global sound spanning all the continents.’